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Published: 10 March, 2011

• THE government has a new mental health strategy, but you’d never know it, as funding for mental health in our area takes a £12.7million cut. 

Our mental health trust wants to close over 100 beds, and to close two mental health hospitals/ units. They want us to decide where these cuts should take place. I was horrified last week to be visiting a mental health ward, where I witnessed patients being asked which services should be cut – a question that is not exactly going to promote the mental health of the patients being “consulted”. One of the “consultation” team asked me to participate. I declined.

The utter tragedy of this story is that I had brought back from his first home leave to the Highgate Mental Health Centre the person for whom I care. He is seriously ill. When we arrived we were told that he had been discharged because there was not a single spare bed for him to sleep in at the hospital. We protested and stayed all day and, miraculously, a bed was found for him that night. This was only because I complained.

Who was the patient who got ejected from the hospital to vacate the bed? How many other patients are being treated in this way and not able to fight back so forcibly? Why is the trust succumbing instead of mounting a national campaign against cuts to the most vulnerable who are unable to do anything about it?

The least we can do is go en masse to the TUC demonstration on March 26.

SHIRLEY FRANKLIN
Chair of Defend the Whittington Hospital Coalition